It’s an odd frailty for a professional politician, and Bush says it took him years of effort to overcome his inborn shyness.
“I learned that in order to make your case, or in order to serve or in order to advance a cause, you have to connect with people,” he said earlier this year. “You have to engage with people, look ’em in the eye, connect with them on a human level, understand where they’re coming from.”
Ferguson continues on about the potential Bush candidacy,
Bush’s enthusiasm for the Common Core educational standards and his advocacy of leniency for illegal immigrants apparently mark him as a “moderate,” a designation the political press has happily taken up.
At the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference, in suburban Washington, D.C., the mention of Bush’s name produced a round of boos louder even than the catcalls that rained down after a mention of Hillary Clinton.
...To understand the strangeness of the position that Jeb Bush finds himself in, it helps to look at his record as a practicing politician—a governor. When he left office in 2007, the verdict on his tenure was unanimous among Republicans, “moderates” and right-wingers alike. Writing in this magazine at the time, Fred Barnes summed it up: After two terms in office, Bush was not only the best governor in America but also the most conservative. Moreover, Republicans assumed that he was the former because he was the latter: His success was directly attributable to his ideology. That he should now be condemned as a moderate is a new and unexpected lesson in the education of Jeb Bush.
...The fall of his senior year he enrolled in a study-abroad course with the baggy title “Man and Society,” which took him to Mexico for several weeks. There he met the sister of a classmate’s girlfriend, a 17-year-old named Columba Gallo, known as Colu, and . . . “Boom! I was gone,” he said later. “She was the first girl I ever loved, and the last.”
Tradition suggested that the next stop on a Bush’s itinerary was Yale, alma mater to four generations of Jeb’s family. Instead he returned to Texas, where he had spent most of his boyhood, and enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in two and a half years, with a degree in Latin American Studies. He was admitted to UT law school but says he was too eager to get on with life to spend three years studying torts. He and Colu, by then 21 and 20, were married in the campus chapel, and their first child, George Prescott Bush, arrived two years later (followed in the next few years by a sister, Noelle, and a brother, Jeb).
... His first job out of UT was as an officer, and soon vice president, of a bank founded by the grandfather of James Baker, H. W.’s closest friend. It’s good to be a Bush.
The bank job took him and his family to Venezuela for two years, and he used the opportunity to perfect his command of Spanish. Jeb’s family still speak Spanish at home; his children’s first spoken words were in Spanish. Wiseguys have often noted that Jeb speaks Spanish more fluently than some Bushes speak English.
...He settled his family in Miami and, as the vice president’s son, partook modestly of the fame that can still inflame Iowa autograph hunters; Achenbach records a lunch in the late ’80s in which Bush was interrupted by waitresses and busboys asking for immigration help. He took a job with a real estate firm owned by a supporter of his father, hustling rental contracts for corporate clients and scouting investment opportunities. Before the decade was out he was making more than a million dollars a year. By the time he ran for governor, in 1994, he was a wealthy man. By all accounts Bush made his money because he was smart, tireless, creative, unflappable, personable, and a Bush.
...But it’s the ’94 campaign for Florida governor that works as the hinge in Jeb Bush’s political life, a shift whose effects are felt even now, as he introduces himself to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. Already in 1994 he had the reputation of a committed conservative with a libertarian severity: a board member of the Heritage Foundation and reader of intellectual journals like Policy Review and the American Spectator, an aspiring egghead eager to master the minutiae of government policy in hopes of undoing or reversing the ill effects of government policy. Far more ideological than either his brother or his father, he was, said the political consultant Mike Murphy, “the Bush brother with balls.”
After losing the Florida governor's race in 1994, Bush came back in 1998 to win handily. Over that four year waiting period Jeb visited 250 scools, and spent many hours sitting in juvenilte courts to learn about the child welfare system.
In fact, his platform, still festooned with white papers, changed scarcely at all between ’94 and ’98. When Bush won handily, he could rightly claim a mandate for an ambitious agenda: tort reform, tax cuts, limits on abortion, school choice, and much else. Feeney, his first-time running mate, says: “He’d realized that if you’re going to grow the party you’re going to have to bring non-hardcore nonpartisans along with you, on reforms they might not be comfortable with otherwise. It wasn’t just winning an election. It was laying the groundwork for massive conservative reform.”
“Jeb Bush is as conservative as any governor in America, and much more so than most,” wrote the journalist Tucker Carlson in 1999. “But you’d never know it unless you listened carefully, or took a close look at the bills he supports. If Bush’s legislation is radical, his tone is all accommodation and empathy.”
The Bush record in Florida is like a wish list conjured from right-wing daydreams. With Republican majorities in both houses of the state legislature, “Bush made Florida into a laboratory of conservative governance,” writes Matthew T. Corrigan in Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush Remade Florida, destined for now to be the definitive account of Bush’s eight years in Tallahassee.
Corrigan is a political science professor at the University of North Florida and shows every indication of having the political leanings common to his trade. He records with mounting horror the list of Bush’s successes. While Florida’s population grew by two million, the state government’s workforce declined by 13,000—the result of sweeping privatization of everything from state park maintenance to personnel management. At least one kind of state tax or another was cut every year he was in office, for a total of $19 billion. He left office with a $3 billion surplus in the state treasury. For the first time in history the state earned a AAA bond rating.
“I just think it’s humorous,” Tom Feeney says now, when reminded that lots of reporters and Republicans are calling Bush a moderate. “It’s pure revisionism for anyone to ignore the fact that he was the most conservative governor in the country.”
Ferguson goes on to document Bush's bonafides in abortion, racial policies, welfare, and gay rights, then shows how Bush reformed education. In fact, reform is just what he would like to do as president:
Why can’t presidents reform things? It seems to me there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit there: procurement policies, career civil service reform, job training programs, our public assistance programs—they’re all mired in the old way of doing things. Why can’t a president change things?”Read more here.
Eventually he says: “You can be a conservative and still solve problems for people.”
Reading up on Bush’s record and talking about it with the (worshipful) people who helped make it happen, you might start to wonder: Is he pulling a Reverse Bush? For years conservative Republicans accused his father and brother of being closet moderates who only talked like conservatives for the sake of politics; the charge was generally accurate. Maybe Jeb is reversing the trick: a self-conscious, deep-dyed conservative who for the moment feels the need to look like a moderate, especially before an admiring press and in the company of the wealthy Republicans who these days are his constant companions and marks.
It’s a dicey strategy, if it’s a strategy at all. His constant refrain—he will use government according to conservative principles to help people—may fall flat in a party whose members, lots of them, don’t think they want government to help them at all; they just want it to leave them alone. Republicans still laugh at the old joke about the biggest lie: “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help you.” Can Jeb Bush persuade them it’s not a joke after all?
His education, and ours, continues.
My only disappointment with this article is that it did not touch on Bush's record and views with regard to the issues of Comprehensive Immigration Reform and Common Core. Those are the two issues most often cited by conservatives as the reason they oppose Bush.
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